Rapid Acceleration of Journal Production and New Digital Workflow for Wiley-Blackwell

Wiley-Blackwell is the world’s largest global society publisher and one of the foremost academic and professional publishers, producing more than 1,500 scholarly peer-reviewed journals and 1,500+ new books annually, in print and online, as well as databases, major reference works and laboratory protocols.

Challenge Rapidly Accelerate Journal Production While Expanding Delivery Options

The world of journal publishing is competitive. Wiley-Blackwell vies for authors for whom speed of publication is critical and who find strong temptation among new digital publishing alternatives. To forge ahead of the competition, Wiley-Blackwell set extremely aggressive objectives to reduce online publication of peer-reviewed articles to just 15 days, employ an XML-first workflow with online proofing capability, and improve access to eMarkets.

Solution Aptara’s PXE4™ End-to-End Digital Publishing Platform

Wiley-Blackwell had to identify the necessary improvement processes and supporting technology that would enable them to meet their ambitious goals. After wrestling with the “build or buy” question, they issued a criteria-rich RFP that included such specs as: a web-based solution with robust content management and version control, an interface that supports contributor-level editing, and XML creation. Wiley-Blackwell found all of this—and more—in Aptara’s PXE4.

A web-based platform, PXE4 provides an end-to-end multi-channel digital workflow for the creation of structured reusable content and:

• supports Wiley Blackwell’s existing workflows, thereby minimizing staff disruption and implementation time
• integrates content creation, editing, corrections and formatting into a streamlined workflow, supplanting traditional
• manual-intensive editing environments and processes
• accepts Word, PDF and XML files, and enables authoring direct in PXE4’s word processor-like interface
• provides flexible multi-channel publishing for eReaders, tablets, PCs and print—all from a single content source—avoiding
• the need to retrofit traditional production processes for new digital products

Results Significant Reduction in Journal Production Time and a New Multi-Channel Digital Workflow

Aptara’s PXE4 digital publishing platform has reduced Wiley-Blackwell’s turnaround time to 15 days for a number of journals. The success of this undertaking has resulted in the deployment of PXE4 across multiple Wiley divisions and a prestigious Wiley Pacesetter Award for the team responsible for PXE4’s selection and implementation. Adopting Aptara’s web-based PXE4 has helped Wiley-Blackwell:

• re-engineer journal workflow to gain XML-first advantages
• drastically reduce article turnaround to 15 days
• provide authors and editors with online proofing capabilities
• enable Wiley-Blackwell to publish final content online even further in advance of its print editions than before
• deliver critical peer-reviewed findings to scientific and medical communities faster than ever before